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An anonymous reader writes with this quote from PC Authority:
"Over the years many voices have declared PC gaming dead. We have seen developers abandon the platform for consoles, citing piracy as the cause. Game stores have slowly relegated PC games from prime shelf position to one tucked away in the back corner — even Microsoft dumped AAA PC game developers from the company. It seems, though, that the demise of the PC as a games platform has been exaggerated, because until very recently sales data ignored digital distribution, with the latest data released by US company NPD revealing that 48% of PC unit sales in the US in 2009 were digital. That translates to 21.3 million games downloaded in the US. Interestingly, although 48% of games were sold online, it only worked out as 36% of the revenue. This highlights the fact that it isn't just convenience that has PC gamers shopping online; it is also that games are generally cheaper than in stores."

could it be because our doctors have the skill to allow babies to be born that would be stillborn elsewhere, but then subsequently die from complications? This is a misleading statistic that doesn't take the whole picture into account.

superapecommando sends along a Wall Street Journal report that indicates that Facebook's privacy troubles may be just beginning. "Facebook, MySpace, and several other social networking sites have been sending data to advertising companies that could be used to find consumers' names and other personal details, despite promises they don't share such information without consent. The practice, which most of the companies defended, sends user names or ID numbers tied to personal profiles being viewed when users click on ads. After questions were raised by The Wall Street Journal, Facebook and MySpace moved to make changes. By Thursday morning Facebook had rewritten some of the offending computer code. ... Several large advertising companies ... including Google Inc.'s DoubleClick and Yahoo Inc.'s Right Media, said they were unaware of the data being sent to them from the social networking sites, and said they haven't made use of it. ... The sites may have been breaching their own privacy policies as well as industry standards. ... Those policies have been put forward by advertising and Internet companies in arguments against the need for government regulation."

It would be a huge undertaking, but I think it's a goal worth striving for.

Why? The masses are uninformed, easily swayed sheep without the time or resources necessary to properly investigate any given piece of legislation. not only that, but most of them wouldn't vote anyway.
I'm not saying a republic is perfect, but its still better than what a direct democracy would be.

thomst writes "Charles Q. Choi of LiveScience reports that a farmer in southern Henan Province in China has dug up the first known ant-eating dinosaur, a half-meter-long theropod (the dinosaur family to which T. Rex belongs), whose fossilized remains were described as 'fairly intact'. The 83- to 89-million-year-old pygmy dinosaur has been named named Xixianykus zhangi by Xig Xu, De-you Wang, Corwin Sullivan, David Hone, Feng-lu Han, Rong-hao Yan, and Fu-ming Du, whose paper on the critter, A basal parvicursorine (Theropoda: Alvarezsauridae) from the Upper Cretaceous of China, was published in the March 29 issue of Zootaxa (the abstract is available in PDF format for free, the full article is paywall-protected.)"

Okay, first off, I agree with everything you've said here.
But why has it become so common these days to call people with different or even incorrect information "liars"? Isn't it enough to just call them wrong and point out why? Why attribute deliberate deception to them without any proof? All that does is foster hostility and blind them to the point you are trying to make.

The alcohol itself killed people when it was poisoned.
The people that die nowadays are killed by other *people* making poor decisions and abusing alcohol, not by the alcohol itself.
An important distinction, I think.